Re: [xml-dev] RE: James Clark: XML versus the Web

[Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>]

On Dec 15, 2010, at 17:20, James Clark wrote:

> On Thu, Dec 16, 2010 at 8:05 AM, Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi> wrote:
>>  XSLT hasn't been designed for maintaining a continuous and incrementally updating relationship between the input and output trees.
> 
> Not true (at least for XSLT 1; can't speak for XSLT 2).  This is exactly what you need for an XSLT-driven XML editor, which was certainly one of the things XSLT was designed to enable.  It is the reason why certain useful features were left out of XSLT (result tree fragments as node-sets).  There have been implementations of this.

Interesting. I guess I should have said that all browser *implementations* of XSLT run the transform to completion and don't make it possible to update the output incrementally by changing the input incrementally and I shouldn't have claimed anything about *design*.

Which implementations support a reflecting incremental input updates in the output? Given everything that XSLT lets you do, how can the contribution of a piece of input to the output be tracked in a practical way?

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/